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Mid-life Crisis – as facebook message

I've been pretty lucky. Married well. 90s tech boom helped. Real estate too. No children = $$ in the bank.

Which brings me to the RAGE -- it arises against all forms of hypocrisy. If you knew me then but don't remember, I was an introspective (depressed?) kid in High School -- a doper (mostly marijuana) that listened to a lot of "punk" rock -- Elvis Costello, The Clash, Richard Hell (I implore you to read the lyrics to Blank Generation), etc. As a reasonably creative person, I worship art that is simultaneously: intellectual and/or edgy/disturbing (cuts both ways) and/or ultimately idealistic/classic.

In the 80s I went to college late and became a Reagan Republican. I "drank the Kool Aid." I was always (German, Calvinist) "fiscally conservative" anyway. And, again, Reagan’s "rich get richer" "trickle-down" bullshit actually, sort of, worked for me. I “succeeded” -- certainly more than I'd ever imagined as a kid.

Then one day, in the third year of the first Bush2 term, I took a fresh look around my town (after moving back to MT/Helena) and realized it wasn't working for most -- and really not even for me... Yes, I was a "millionaire" – but in a world where only "billionaires" mattered. "They" had raised the bar again! And I realized, for work-a-day people (on CNBC they call us "consumers"), by design, there is no winning! Not really. Statistically, winning under this system exhibits roughly the same probability as being struck by lightning (I'm exaggerating, but it's an appropriate analogy). And we can't all be struck by lightning now can we? So why support a Reagan-inspired socio-economic system that only rewards lightning strikes -- and worse – perpetually rewards the heirs of those struck literally centuries ago?

So now (middle age, I hope) I'm a Marxist/anarchist/populist punk, again. And I vow never to go back to being an “I’ve got mine; Go fuck yourself!” Reagan/Bush/Cheney Republican again.

Conversely, if you've never seen the movie "Five Easy Pieces," I highly recommend it. Allegorically, that angry-young-man perspective alternates as thesis/antithesis in my life. In other words, LIFE is very, very complicated... But I don't want to always be that guy – giving up on everything – distrusting and attacking every commonly accepted social value (as I sometimes do).

Jesus wanted a better, fairer world. And in theory, sentient beings should be able to escape Darwin’s Petri dish Natural Selection, Nietzsche's Will To Power and Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand -- even if doing so doesn’t reward Calvinists like me (as a son of my father). In other words, the human race should somehow equate to more than jobs, money and consumption! That and there exists today an obvious imperative to realign the system around physical/resource reality. In short, it’s too easy to get lost (billions of un/under-employed), stranded (me) by success or consumed (Earth) by market-based capitalism. Surely we can fix , or at least improve upon, it? Surely there exists a hybrid (top-down; bottom-up) strategy redounding to greater shared opportunity that reaches beyond property/capital hegemony (e.g. global commons).

Psychiatry states that "male outlook" mostly improves around age 50 – and even a lifelong cynic occasionally hopes…